Civic Consciences

Renewal. Urban sprawl. Relocation. High rise v. low rise. Blighted areas. Glass-box buildings. Open space. Population density.

For big-city newspapers, some of the most important new language and news in recent years has concerned the condition of the city itself. As billions of dollars are spent on the revitalization of dying downtowns, as crumbling old neighborhoods are bulldozed away, as the past gives way to the present, a hybrid journalist is developing--the urban reporter-critic. Reporting, he keeps citizens abreast of what's going up and coming down, what city planners envision for the future. Criticizing, he serves as a civic conscience--denouncing the banal, calling for conservation of the historic or unique, pointing out that planners who think big sometimes err even bigger.

Subjects of such size often provoke pomposity, but the major critics turn out lively as well as worthy copy.

> Allan Temko, 43, is the hip, peppery critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. He likes to think of himself as a cultural historian with a mass audience. "I have a well-developed jugular instinct when confronted with mediocrity," he says. In the six years he has written for the paper, he has drawn his share of blood. Almost singlehanded, he forced the Catholic Church to revise ultraconventional plans for a new cathedral; he caused the city to change its plans for a bridge spanning south San Francisco Bay. "What a graceful, avant-garde bridge," he says of the finished product, "and they were going to have us driving in a cage over the most beautiful bay in the world." He once complained: "Although I am not especially eager for my daughter to marry one, some of my best friends are engineers." Says Chronicle City Editor Abe Mellinkoff: "Temko's stuff is just as salable as a murder in the Tenderloin."

> Wolf Von Eckardt, 49, a wide-ranging critic for the Washington Post, is a self-appointed protector of Washington monuments past and to come--but he is engagingly unpredictable. He urged the Kennedy cultural center to copy the best features of New York's Lincoln Center. "The camp thing to do is to call Lincoln Center middlebrow or mediocre," he writes, "but I happen to thrill to noble proportions, a festive progression of spaces, and most of all perhaps to the kind of architecture which, like good writing, is so compelling that you don't even notice that it is good." Disagreeing with the editorial position of his own paper, he came out in favor of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial: "Sure, it looks like granite darts. But it's about time we have something in Washington besides Greek temples and Roman edifices--something from the mid-20th century in which we live." Another something he has suggested, only half in jest, is the construction of floating swimming pools in the Potomac--since nobody seems anxious to clean up the polluted river.

> George McCue, 56, who joined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1943, has been art and urban-design critic since 1956. From the beginning, he was appalled that city planners and artists worked in virtual isolation. "There was neatness and order inside the art galleries," he says, "dinginess and chaos outside. Architects and artists were just not in touch." McCue has worked to bring them together to revitalize the city. He has had a voice in the city's extensive renewal program. No ideologue, he has favored high-rise buildings in one area, opposed them in another because they would detract from the new, soaring Gateway Arch. "One of the biggest challenges," he says, "is in trying to deal with the this-is-it situation in which many of our enormously complicated public projects are introduced to the public, all gift-wrapped in an elaborate presentation brochure, every design settled, and with the sponsors terribly hopeful that the newspapers will be so much impressed with the feasibility report that they won't be difficult." McCue is always difficult.

> The New York Times' Ada Louise Huxtable, who has held her job since 1963, is a petite 5 ft. 1 in.; yet she throws a lot of weight around. A frontpage article of hers describing the chaotic development of Staten Island helped goad the city to belated action. She is, in fact, often consulted by Mayor Lindsay's environment-conscious administration. She is not above deriding what offends her--the Kennedy International Airport, for example ("The promise of the air age, which was bold and brilliant, has petered out into a world of petty vulgarity and perpetual Muzak"), or contemporary religious architecture ("churches poised like moon rockets, synagogues of country-club luxe in jazzy concrete shells, and far-out flying saucer chapels"). She is equally ardent about structures that please her, such as Eero Saarinen's CBS skyscraper, which she compares to the "forbidding stony strength" of Florence's Strozzi Palace. "Since a child," says this native New Yorker who has never lived anywhere else, "I have been a lover of cities and buildings."

The need for environmental criticism is also being met in smaller cities--and across entire regions. Robert W. Glasgow, regional editor of the Arizona Republic, roams the West, warning that even that land-rich area will have to plan carefully to contain its rapidly growing population. Hub Meeker of the Dayton Journal Herald has succeeded in stimulating a new awareness in his city of architectural design. Douglas Nunn, urban affairs editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, brings to his job a longtime city-hall reporter's grasp of how politics affects city planning. Only last year, Nunn replaced the Courier-Journal's veteran city critic, Grady Clay, who has become a consultant to Northwestern University's newly founded urban-affairs school for journalists.

What all the critics have in common is an uncommon passion for urban life. They do not share the still deep-rooted U.S. suspicion of big cities; in fact, they delight in them, even in their imperfect state. Nor is it just the city of the past they are trying to preserve. "Too many preservationists think that if it's old, it's O.K.," says Mrs. Huxtable, who has shown her own independence by praising the new glass-walled buildings of Park Avenue as "magnificent vernacular architecture." What is called for, she believes, is not sentimentality but "constant watchfulness." That means keeping an eye on little things as well as big. She once noted that on approaching the Sam Rayburn statue in the new House Office Building in Washington, a visitor got a view of the seat of Sam's pants. After the piece appeared, the statue was turned around.

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